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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable, but that the interface is the easiest to adapt to our workflow.

I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious.

Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what was an easy business decision.. e.g. it was easier to start a dotcom than to migrate a traditional corporate process.

What we will see here with AI is not the immediate replacement of jobs, but the disruption of markets with offerings that human labor simply can't out-compete.

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> I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable

I don't know. It seems pretty friendly to automation to me.

When was the last time you wrote assembly? When was the last time you had map memory? Think about blitting memory to a screen buffer to draw a square on a screen? Schedule processes and threads?

These are things that I routinely did as a junior engineer writing software a long time ago. Most people at that time did. For the most part, the computer does them all now. People still do them, but only when it really counts and applications are niche.

Think about how large code bases are now and how complicated software systems are. How many layers they have. Complexity on this scale was unthinkable not so long ago.

It's all possible because the computer manages much of the complexity through various forms of automation.

Expect more automation. Maybe LLMs are the vehicle that delivers it, maybe not. But more automation in software is the rule, not the exception.

This has been my argument as well. We've been climbing the abstraction ladder for years. Assembly -> C -> OOP ->... this just seems like another layer of abstraction. "Programmers" are going to become "architects".

The labor cost of implementing a given feature is going to dramatically drop. Jevons Paradox paradox will hopefully still mean that the labor pool will just be used to create '10x' the output (or whatever the number actually is).

If the cost of a line of code / feature / app becomes basically '0', will we still hit a limit in terms of how much software can be consumed? Or do consumers have an infinite hunger for new software? It feels like the answer has to be 'it's finite'. We have a limited attention span of (say) 8hrs/person * 8 billion.

the cost of creating a line of code dropped to zero. the ongoing cost of having created a line of code has if anything gone up.

LLMs are just another layer of abstraction on top of countless. It’s not going to be the last layer, though.

RAD programming held the same promise, as did UML, flow/low/no code platforms.

Inevitably, people remember that the hard part of programming isn't so much the code as it is putting requirements into maintainable code that can respond to future requirements.

LLMs basically only automate the easiest part of the job today. Time will tell if they get better, but my money is on me fixing people's broken LLM generated businesses rather than being replaced by one.

Indeed. Capacity to do the hard parts of software engineering well may well be our best indicator of AGI.

I don't think LLMs alone are going to get there. They might be a key component in a more powerful system, but they might also be a very impressive dead end.

Sometimes I think we’re like cats that stumbled upon the ability to make mirrors. Many cats react like there’s another cat in the mirror, and I wonder if AGI is just us believing we can make more cats if we make the perfect mirror.

I do think software engineering is more exposed than many other jobs for multiple reasons:

There is an unimaginable amount of freely accessible training data out there. There aren't for example many transcribed therapy sessions out there.

The only thing that matters about software is that it's cheap and it sort of works. Low-quality software is already common. Bugs aren't usually catastrophic in the way structural failures would be.

Software engineers are expensive compared to many other white-collar workers.

Software engineering is completely unregulated and there is no union or lobby for software engineers. The second an LLM becomes good enough to replace you, you're gone.

Many other "sit at desk" jobs have at least some tasks that can't be done on a computer.

Software engineering feels like an extremely uncertain career right now.

I'm not so certain that non-desk jobs will be safe either. What makes the current LLMs great at programming is the vast amount of training data. There might be some other breakthrough for typical jobs - some combination of reinforcement learning, training on videos of people doing things, LLMs and old-fashioned AI.

The only thing that AI is good at is a job that someone has already done before.

So 99% of all jobs

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